The dating scene at my high school over the course of senior year is one typical of most high schools across the country. Many people aren’t in committed relationships, preferring to spend time with their classmates as friends or casually with no strings attached, ready to enjoy senior year and, as it draws to a close, the last summer at home before we all disperse to college or jobs or other plans. There are several couples that started dating within the past few months and are planning to break up before college. And there are a few couples that have been together for one or more years now and are relatively inseparable inside and outside of school.
Many of these couples plan to stay together next year, despite the distance, for a variety of reasons. Maybe what they have is true love. Maybe they can make it work long-distance, and what they have now will only grow stronger with a few months or several years apart. Personally, I think starting college in a relationship compromises the college experience. It gives you a safety net to fall back on and with that comes a convenient excuse to skip experiences that push you outside your comfort zone. New and scary experiences are a huge part of college life.
Additionally, I think by staying with a high school significant other, you could so easily end up unconsciously settling. You could so easily miss out on meeting or dating or eventually marrying someone who is a better match for you. While proponents of true love will dispute this idea, I find it to be supported through mathematics, via the theory of optimal stopping, which addresses the problem of choosing the best of a list of "n" options in order to maximize expected benefits and minimize expected costs.
The optimal stopping theory is a mathematical way to determine which of n options is the best in a situation in which one must evaluate each option in random order and decide to take the current option or discard it and move to the next one in the moment of evaluation. There is no way to objectively rank all of the options and decide after all options have been reviewed. The optimal stopping theory algorithm states that in order to have the highest probability of selecting the best of n options, one must first reject n/e options and then select the next option that is better than all of the previous options (e is Euler’s number, the base of the natural log function, approximately 2.72). This gives a 37% probability (1/e) that the best option will be selected. This 37% chance, while relatively low, is the highest probability of consistently selecting the best option when one must make a decision directly after the evaluation of the option. It may seem abstract, but this applies directly to the process of dating to eventually find the one person with whom you are most compatible, most in love with, the best person with whom to share your life.
According to the optimal stopping theory, the first n/e options should be rejected, as they are unlikely to be the best option of the set. In terms of dating, n represents the number of people with whom one has the potential to have a relationship. N is limited by many factors, including age, geographic location, common interests, and chemistry, but in general this n is very large. N encompasses the people one meets in high school, college, various jobs, religious groups, friends of friends, and more. With a large n, n/e is surely larger that the number of relationships most people have in high school. As people leave high school in committed relationships and choose to stay together in college, they have not yet experienced their first n/e relationships, and the likelihood of finding the best person so soon in the sequence of relationships is significantly lower than 37%.
There is an abundance of reasons you should broaden your horizons in many different fields as you leave high school for college or other opportunities, but consider this one as well. Relationships can be a crucial component of life and high school relationships can sometimes prove to be strong and long-lasting, but, mathematically speaking, your dating potential expands greatly when you go to college and the optimal stopping point has not yet been reached. As you enter college free of previous commitment to a high school significant other, you have not mathematically limited your chances of meeting and dating the one best person to spend your time with. You can fully experience more of what college has to offer, including new and exciting relationships. So experience all of it when you get to college single!
